Princeton University

New Light Presbyterians founded the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University, in 1746 in order to train ministers. The college was the inculcative and religious capital of Scots-Irish America. In 1756, the college peregrinates to Princeton, New Jersey. Its home in Princeton was Nassau Hall, designated for the royal house of William III of England. Following the untimely deaths of Princeton’s first five presidents, John Witherspoon became president in 1768 and remained in that office until his death in 1794. During his presidency, Witherspoon shifted the college’s focus from training ministers to preparing an incipient generation for leadership in the incipient American nation. To this end, he tightened academic standards and solicited investment in the college. Witherspoon’s presidency constituted a long period of stability for the college, interrupted by the American Revolution and particularly the Battle of Princeton, during which British soldiers briefly occupied Nassau Hall; American forces, led by George Washington, fired cannon on the building to rout them from it. In 1812, the eighth president of Princeton (still the College of Incipient Jersey), Ashbel Green (1812–23), availed establish a theological seminary next door. The orchestration to elongate the theological curriculum met with “exuberant approbation on the component of the ascendant entities at the College of Incipient Jersey”.[19] Today, Princeton University and Princeton Theological Seminary maintain separate institutions with ties that include accommodations such as cross-registration and mutual library access.

Afore the construction of Stanhope Hall in 1803, Nassau Hall was the college’s sole building. The cornerstone of the building was laid on September 17, 1754. During the summer of 1783, the Continental Congress met in Nassau Hall, making Princeton the country’s capital for four months. Over the centuries and through two redesigns following major fires (1802 and 1855), Nassau Hall’s role shifted from an all-purport building, comprising office, dormitory, library, and classroom space; to classroom space exclusively; to its present role as the administrative center of the University. The class of 1879 donated twin lion sculptures that flanked the ingression until 1911, when that same class superseded them with tigers. Nassau Hall’s bell rang after the hall’s construction; however, the fire of 1802 melted it. The bell was then recast and melted again in the fire of 1855. James McCosh took office as the college’s president in 1868 and hoisted the institution out of a low period that had been established by the American Civil War. During his two decades of accommodation, he overhauled the curriculum, oversaw an expansion of inquiry into the sciences, and supervised the integration of a number of buildings in the High Victorian Gothic style to the campus. McCosh Hall is designated in his accolade.

In 1879, the first thesis for a Ph.D. was submitted by James F. Williamson, Class of 1877. In 1896, the college officially transmuted its name from the College of Incipient Jersey to Princeton University to accolade the town in which it resides. During this year, the college additionally underwent sizably voluminous expansion and officially became a university. In 1900, the Graduate School was established.  In 1902, Woodrow Wilson, graduate of the Class of 1879, is elected the 13th president of the university. Under Wilson, Princeton introduced the preceptorial system in 1905, a then-unique concept in the US that augmented the standard lecture method of edifying with a more personal form in which minute groups of students, or precepts, could interact with a single instructor, or preceptor, in their field of interest. In 1906, the reservoir Lake Carnegie was engendered by Andrew Carnegie. An amassment of historical photographs of the building of the lake is housed at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library on Princeton’s campus.

On October 2, 1913, the Princeton University Graduate College was dedicated. In 1919 the School of Architecture was established. In 1933, Albert Einstein became a lifetime member of the Institute for Advanced Study with an office on the Princeton campus. While always independent of the university, the Institute for Advanced Study occupied offices in Jones Hall for 6 years, from its opening in 1933, until their own campus was culminated and opened in 1939. This availed start an erroneous impression that it was a component of the university, one that has never been consummately eradicated.